Originally Posted by CountChocula
You can always replace the hard drive with SSD later, but you simply can't upgrade the GPU and CPU in most laptops. Also, you may want to consider the weight and thickness. There are some super powerful desktop replacement type laptops that are great for gaming, but so heavy and bulky that they sort of defeat the purpose of buying a laptop in the first place.

No - like I said in my earlier posts, in Clevo laptops you CAN replace the CPU and GPU very easily. All you need is some regular thermal paste (that's the only slightly tricky part). You'll void the warranty, so this ideally needs to be done after a year or so. Also, you need to make sure Clevo has updated the BIOS for the GPU which was always forthcoming in the past (although needed some 'prodding' for the 680M).

The CPU is switchable in practice if you buy a cheap dead laptop on ebay (eg terminal mobo or GPU fault) with the same chipset and a working quad core. Or buy a retail quad when you're next visiting Asia.

The GPU is switchable provided it is the same standard interface, currently mxm3. My '08 Clevo used the previous gen interface, mxm 2.1 and so is limited to a 280MGTX (which I upgraded it to from a 8800MGTX). However Nvidia is not known for its honest practices, so it's possible that mxm4 (or whatever) will come out in a month and render the whole point moot.

Aww, maybe try later when it gets obsolete - it really is like lego and Clevos are designed to be easy to access the 'hood'. My 08 Clevo has been updated 5 times and is still capable of running most modern games at mid settings (which it could no way do on the original specs), and the cost has been negligible.

On the dead pixels - I personally wouldn't go for any warranty. If it works out of the box, it's very, very, unlikely to develop a pixel issue. If it has one out of the box (fair chance) then send it back under distance selling regs (perhaps try some of the freeware pixel stimulating aps overnight beforehand). Besides, you'll probably spend most of your time hooked up to an external monitor.

As for the specs, well you know my view on CPU's So for your budget, I'd go for a Clevo built by deviltech.de, with a blistering 680M GTX, SSD and i3. I'm willing to bet that most games will be a lot faster. The fact that game devs list 'quad core' is meaningless (or worse, it's something 'approved' by Intel's marketing director). If you have some time, read about CPU + games on sites like tomshardware and anandtech.

Anyhow, best of luck with whatever you go for - I think you're definitely on the right track.

Eek :O
680 ???
The 670 is already 100£ more expensive. I can't even think how much more the 680 would be (can't check now, on my phone).

I went onto notebook check and the i7 seems to get much better benchmark ratings than the i5 and it's not that much more expensive.

I appreciate your opinion, but I've never actually played games on highest settings lest they be older games. My 330 card can handle samurai total war on medium settings quite well already which I am presuming to be quite intensive game.

So I don't think that going for an x80 is going to be worth the cost for me personally.
I thought the 650 was already way higher spec than the 330 or 630 I guess for this gen of cards.

You're probably right that I won't need the i7 either, but in terms of cost vs. benchmark difference it seems more worth it.

I'll check out deviltech but the .de is telling me they probably won't deliver to the UK…

Benchmarks usually contain a CPU element, perhaps for people who do lots of video editing? The best benchmark for gaming is FRAPS when playing. I have a Clevo P170 and the FRAPS were almost unchanged by a swap down to i3 (except XPlane 10 where they plunged). I'm going to play Arma2 because I suspect that one will also be hit. However the FRAPS went through the roof when I replaced the 580M GTX with the 680.

If deviltech don't ship to UK, try the same spec on MySN and NEXOC (the only ones I have dealt with - others here). Or when you know the exact spec and model try clevoweb.co.uk, although they 'officially' only do wholesale to people like pcspecialist.

Originally Posted by Pladio
Oh sorry, one more question …. Will the 660 be able to play 1080p movies without stuttering ? And would I have to reduce the resolution on games to play at medium settings ?

Absolutely no stuttering and medium setting should be fine, except maybe real fancy stuff light flight sims that may need to go to low.

For pairing higher end graphics cards with lower end CPUs, here's an interesting benchmark where the 7970m graphics card was paired with AMD A10-4600M APU and compared with another laptop with 7970m and i7-3720QM.

The A10-4600m is one of the top mobile AMD processors available, but it is significantly slower than the i7-3720QM. The extent to which the slower CPU would bottleneck performance depends a lot on the game, but it seems to be occurring with Arkham City, which is an older game and not especially CPU-bound compared to other, more recent games that are more optimized for CPU.

Originally Posted by Pladio
I can return the laptop within 7 days, no questions asked.

The dead pixel thing is an extra £20 for a year or £12 for a month.

LCD manufacturing has dramatically improved over the past several years so you are very unlikely to have dead pixels. It's not an entirely impossible though and since the screen is attached to the machine in the case of laptops, it does happen and it can be quite frustrating when its a bright stuck-on pixel in the middle of the screen. At 12 pounds it might be worth it for the peace of mind but you will be unlikely to need it. I wouldn't bother with the one year one at all though since this sort of defect is going to be immediately obvious the first time you boot it up if you take a close careful look at the screen. In either case it would be better of thinking of it as buying peace of mind instead of insurance because the risk is so low.

So if you buy it then it will most likely be wasted money and if you don't buy it there's a very small chance you'll have dead pixels that fall outside the existing ISO dead pixel specs and be out of luck. I'd be willing to bet you 100 pounds you won't make use of it if you do buy it - if that gives you some estimation of how much you need to or don't need to worry.

Originally Posted by jhwisner
LCD manufacturing has dramatically improved over the past several years so you are very unlikely to have dead pixels. It's not an entirely impossible though and since the screen is attached to the machine in the case of laptops, it does happen and it can be quite frustrating when its a bright stuck-on pixel in the middle of the screen. At 12 pounds it might be worth it for the peace of mind but you will be unlikely to need it. I wouldn't bother with the one year one at all though since this sort of defect is going to be immediately obvious the first time you boot it up if you take a close careful look at the screen. In either case it would be better of thinking of it as buying peace of mind instead of insurance because the risk is so low.

So if you buy it then it will most likely be wasted money and if you don't buy it there's a very small chance you'll have dead pixels that fall outside the existing ISO dead pixel specs and be out of luck. I'd be willing to bet you 100 pounds you won't make use of it if you do buy it - if that gives you some estimation of how much you need to or don't need to worry.

It seems a bit pointless to buy the dead pixel warranty if you can return it for full refund for any reason within 7 days. As jhwisner mentions, if your display has some dead pixels, it would be most likely evident when you boot it up the first time, in which case you can simply return it for refund.

Originally Posted by CountChocula
It seems a bit pointless to buy the dead pixel warranty if you can return it for full refund for any reason within 7 days. As jhwisner mentions, if your display has some dead pixels, it would be most likely evident when you boot it up the first time, in which case you can simply return it for refund.

Oh they have a no questions asked return policy for the first 7 days? Then yeah just don't volunteer that you're returning it because of dead pixels and you should be fine. So yeah that makes the fee here pretty much completely extraneous.

They dont sell that lenovo one in the UK. Or I havent found it. They seem to have slightly different models. Also the price isquite similar to the one on pcspecialist.

I might delay the buying of the laltop by a month as I am moving houses in february or march. So I would need to use the money to pay for my deposit. I willlet you know what happenz in a few months or come back formore advice :-)

Also please forgive my spelling mistakes as I am writing with a friend's tablet.